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Columns > LongShot > #84: Going Casual Part II
This week in gaming by a guy who spent all week pretty much ignoring it unless it smacked him in the face and said, "Listen up!"  Welcome to the end of my week as a casual gamer! For those that missed last week's column, in an effort to discover how much gaming information makes its way to the casual game player, I took a week off from all enthusiast gaming sources. I picked this week specifically because it's the week of gaming's biggest event, E3. During and before the show, there are always major stories for the enthusiast to follow and you can't miss all the excitement if you visit IGN, Gamespot or any number of videogame web sites across the Internet. I wanted to find out how much of this excitement makes its way to Joe Q. Public who might only buy a couple games a year. Here's what I know about video games from the last week. Microsoft and Sony are introducing new game systems. The Xbox 360 is coming from Microsoft and it features wireless controllers and wireless Internet connections. Games look better than they do on Xbox according to Microsoft. It will play a bunch of new games but there was no word in the mainstream press about it playing my original Xbox games. It comes out in the fall but I don't know how much it will cost. I saw a few games on the MTV special last week but I'm not sure too many folks watched that and I feel dirty having done so myself. All those kids who were pumping their fists and cheering at the white mechanical idol on the stage are going to burn in hell. The entire program was embarrassing to me as a gamer and as a normal everyday human being. To top it off, the games didn't even look any better than what I was playing this past week, Jade Empire. Sony's system is called Playstation 3 and it comes out in Spring of 2006. IT'S 35 TIMES MORE POWERFUL THAN PLAYSTATION 2! Holy crap! Will it create an army of terminators and take over the world? It's also wireless with support for seven really awful looking controllers that double as boomerangs. It will play something called Blu-Ray discs which it said was high-definition. It also supports two HDTV sets. I don't even have one of those so I don't know who the hell they're making this thing for because it sure isn't me. It also plays a bunch of other disc types and has a removable hard drive. The best thing I saw is that my PS2 and PSX games will work on it. That's nice because I can play all my old games. I didn't like that the only games they mentioned were Tekken, Gran Turismo and Devil May Cry. I've played like a billion of those already. Aren't they going to make something new? In USA Today on Tuesday I saw an article by Steve Kent on Nintendo. He says they also have a videogame system coming out sometime in 2006. It's the size of three DVD cases stacked on one another. It'll play Gamecube discs but it also has Internet stuff and will let me play old N64, SNES and NES games too through some kind of downloadable service. It says it plays movies also. He also said there's a new Game Boy called the Game Boy Micro. That thing is freaking awesome! It's so tiny! I'll definitely get one of those to carry around in my pocket with the new Fire Emblem in it or something. Nintendo is also making that DS thing play online games. That sounds neat too. Finally, they have a new Zelda game coming to Gamecube for Christmas. Now, you might not believe it, but that's absolutely all I know about E3 from the mainstream press. There was no mention of new games for any system but Gamecube, which I might add we all know is the last place system worldwide. Why is Nintendo the only one promoting games for their current system? Why the heck aren't there any new games for Xbox and PS2? I just got an Xbox last fall. Is Microsoft really saying to me I need to buy a new console this Christmas if I want to keep on using Xbox Live for new games? Why isn't Sony going to have some big new game for me this Christmas on their Playstation 2? I haven't had that thing very long. Didn't they just put out some kind of handheld thing too? PSP? I read absolutely nothing about that except that it can be a $250 controller for the PS3 which will probably cost me another $300 to $400 plus games and accessories in spring of next year. Plus... spring? Who puts out videogame machines in the spring? And hey, didn't Nintendo do that connectivity thing and everyone said it sucked? Is that really cool now that Sony's doing it? Double-standards anyone? As far as where I got all the info above, I actually had to go pretty far to find it. I saw a Playstation 3 article while browsing CNN.com. It was a link near the top of the page. A lot of people don't look at the Internet for news so that's probably even pushing it. I watched the MTV special for Xbox 360 and most of what I know came from there and one article I stumbled into on Comcast.net. Nintendo info was completely barren in the local newspaper. You'd think they don't exist. I stumbled into the USA Today article while on the toilet at my job when I saw the Life section lying on the floor in the stall. Dunno who left it there, but thanks for that! The bottom line for me in this experiment is that most people really don't hear a whole lot about videogames. If you're not on the Internet daily and especially if you don't work in a job where you have access to the Internet, you're probably not going to know too much about what's going on in videogames. Your best source of info is probably the guys at the EB or Gamestop store if you even make it in that place. Best Buy might even be your best friend for videogame info. There's also your group of friends, and here's where I actually learned the most. None of the folks I work with are as hardcore into games as I am, but they were all well aware of E3 and the new system announcements. However, even they missed the Game Boy Micro thing. I had to show that to someone I know. They were wowed by the Playstation 3 stuff. They weren't so enthusiastic about the new Xbox and no one even mentioned Nintendo's Revolution except my best friend who also digs Nintendo's games quite a lot. I actually barged into their work area laughing out loud when I saw the 35x more powerful than Playstation 2 comment by Sony. C'mon, that's just ludicrously inflated and typical Sony PR blather, isn't it? How can anyone take that seriously, especially when the Xbox 360 stuff shown on MTV didn't look any better than current PCs can handle? As you can tell, it's very hard to leave your hardcore gamer self behind when you shut off the faucet of daily videogame information. You really are more skeptical of everything when you're hardcore. You're not as quick to believe what you read and you just can't imagine anyone can believe some of the things said in the press about these new machines. Yet many folks really do eat it up, at least until they get burned by it enough times. The single biggest problem I see with this E3, and its appearance to the outside world in particular, is that it looks like Playstation 2 and Xbox are already dead. The Gamecube has the one game anyone's talking about for this Holiday season. All the mainstream reported to me was how these new machines will battle for the living room and what will be inside of them. They didn't really show me any games or tell me anything about the games, well, except for telling me there'll be new versions of games I've seen ten times before. It was all about the hardware itself. And really, who cares about the hardware when I buy these things to play games? Plus, what am I supposed to play from now until I can afford one of these machines? Looks like I've got the Zelda game coming, but not a whole lot else. Next week I'll look at all the stuff that I've missed this week and what I think looks exciting for the future. I'll probe the new consoles' innards a little further and probably comment a bit on that. I'll also hopefully turn up some games that I can get excited about from now until these new mega machines are available. It's just so stupid to me how there were countless industry folks saying they left a big wad of money on the table during the shift from PSX to PS2 and now we're watching the exact same thing happening all over again from what I can see. For Microsoft especially, it's a complete turn of their back on the current Xbox and all its newly found success. The system really only started gaining some kind of awareness in the past 18 months and now it's already dead by the end of 2005. That seems so completely brainless to me. Also, the total lack of PSP information makes that look like something that's dead before it even got going. I mean, a controller for PS3? Be serious. No one liked it when Nintendo did it with the GBA. Who's really going to care about it now? And if they do, then the hypocrisy will be completely overwhelming, especially if praise now comes from the enthusiast press. Obviously I'm going to find out more about all this stuff as I hit the game sites for information through the weekend. To the casual gamer though, it really looks like it's time to buy a new console again and they probably aren't all that happy about that. They also have to be wondering if there are any cool games coming out for the console they own now because no one said a word about that stuff. Either that or folks are just cruising along not paying attention to gaming, which I suspect is a very large portion of the population. Despite all the E3 hype surrounding these new consoles, they didn't make it to the Entertainment pages of the newspapers. They didn't generate the kind of buzz that Star Wars: Episode III is generating. In fact, most of the mainstream reporting was more business focused than entertainment focused with articles touching on the importance of these machines to their respective companies and their financial health. This is a major problem I see with videogames right now. No one is doing a very good job selling the entertainment of games. It's all about the technology and eventually people will tire of the technology. The entertainment part of it is completely lost on just about everyone including the mainstream and enthusiast press.
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